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How To Plan a Robin Hood Unit Study Your Kids Will Complain About

As we school year round, this is our last week before taking April off. In an attempt to be a “cool” mom, I thought that rather than do just our normal school work, we’d have a fun week filled with Robin Hood themed games and activities. We were already set to cover the classic as part of our history readings so, Sunday night and Monday morning I quickly compiled some other material to incorporate. In doing so, I clicked through numerous other blogs showing happy kids working on and medieval inspired crafts, gleefully coloring pages for their notebook and overall, just squealing with unbridled enthusiasm.

Holy crap we get to do MORE Robin Hood activities???!!??! I can’t stand it!!!!

I was so excited to share all I found with my kids.

However, any school work, regardless of whether it related to Robin Hood or, I don’t know, Mao Zedong is still school work as far as my kids are concerned, and their response was somewhere between apathy and downright hostility. So I thought I’d share all my findings here just in case you wanted to torture your poor children or, on the off-chance your child actually wants 4,697 writing prompts about Robin Hood.

For spelling, they ditched their books and were allowed to selectRobin Hood lists on Spelling City and play spelling games. This seemed to be going fine until I realized Edie was trying to use Addie’s sixth grade list and was getting very upset at the difficulty. “No, no, no! This is supposed to be fun! FUN! Not frustrating!”

I also invited them to select any pages they’d want to color or complete from afree Robin Hood Unit Study/Lapbook pack I found on Homeschool Share. I didn’t say “lapbook” or they’d instantly think I was making them cut and paste a whole bunch of flaps and tabs. I tried to be subtle like, “I have coloring pages and crosswords and some things to make if you want to learn about weapons.” I mean, weapons, who doesn’t want to learn about weapons????? My son actually asked to write two paragraphs about something other than Robin Hood. Fine. Whatever. I didn’t want to help you study battle axes anyway.

If I’m feeling really ambition/crazy I might consider letting the whole lot construct weaponry. The downside being someone is sure to get hurt, the upside being everyone will sleep soundly tonight. Potential eye stabbers include:

Or perhaps this model:

You can’t forget the bows and arrows.

These seem slightly less threatening.

And if I’m feeling really careless, I could show them some videos on how to fight with a quarterstaff, then set them loose with a few old broom handles. Note to self: remind friend to bring all her kids insurance cards.

And will Fulton or Teddy wear this, if I lovingly construct it for them? Hell no.

It didn’t help that the library was checked out of one of my favorite Robin Hood picture books, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood by Marcia Williams.

Thankfully, we did manage to snag Robin Hood by Margaret Early.

Not that anyone has picked it up to look at it.

Of course my kids usually love movies, and when it comes to Robin Hood, there’s no shortage. While the Men In Tights version is my personal favorite, I don’t know if its very…uh….”academic”. There’s Disney’s classic, Errol Flynn’s old standard from 1938 and if you have Amazon Prime you can watch the 1922 black and white silent version of Robin Hood for free. I always like free, however, I’m sure my kids would get suspicious that I was making them read the dialogue.”Wait, this is, educational!” You can also watch complete episodes of the classic TV show, ‘The Adventure of Robin Hood’ on Hulu.com for free.

At this point, a marathon of Robin Hood movies followed by copious amounts of trampoline time with foam swords sounds delightful. Next time I’m moved to try doing something “different” again, someone smack me with a quarterstaff please. (And if you need help creating your own inspiring unit study, don’t forget I now offer homeschool consulting! I’d love to work with you one on one!)

Typical. I attempted an Olympics unit study, and my children were alternately wildly unenthusiastic or violently opposed. If it doesn’t directly involve Minecraft, they would rather slog through their Latin declensions and move on.

So glad this just doesn’t happen to me! Why is it that anything we think will be fun always ends up being torture? Oh yeah, human nature…..if kids have to do it during the “school” day…it’s no fun, ha ha!